A Caterpillar Named Armageddon
by Archangel1202
Summary: What if the Hungry Caterpillar never got full? What if he never turned into a butterfly? What if, in desperation, he turned to eating human flesh? When this happens, the Caterpillar finds himself in a cycle of eating and killing, which will spread from Earth into the stars themselves.
1. Chapter 1

**Chapter 1**

The very hungry Caterpillar groaned as he devoured the last of the leaf. It was too much food, too much. And yet it wasn't enough. The food hadn't sated the hunger. At best it had put a dent in it. But it was still very much there. Very much present. He'd spent the last god knows how long doing nothing but filling his days and himself with food, and yet it hadn't helped. Were he not so full, he could go on eating forever, it felt like. Carry on forever and never stop. Maybe if he slept for a bit, when he woke up, he might feel better….But no, every time he slept, he felt the hunger pangs, worse than before, and they wrenched his eyes open and drove him to search for food. But surely it was futile. If one apple, two pears, three plums, four strawberries, five oranges, a piece of cake, an ice cream cone and god knows what else had failed to sate his hunger, what could he find that would?

Perhaps he would have continued that way, agony-wracked, hungry yet full, spending his days miserably searching for food, until he finally found some way to die, were it not for one coincidence which changed everything. He was climbing, miserably on a branch that, as far as he could tell, he was the only living creature on, at least of his relative size. That was another thing he had noticed: as he ate, he grew. He'd started out the size of an average Caterpillar, and now he was the size of an incredibly large worm or a very small snake. But he was on his branch, looking for something new to eat, when he heard something he'd never heard before. Some strange sound, fluid and rhythmic, but stopping and starting often. He took the great effort of moving around the branch to see what it was, and saw a strange creature, or what he assumed was a creature. Had he perhaps been more knowledgeable, he would have known it was a human. Ordinarily, he avoided large creatures, especially one as large as this, but something was different today. Maybe it was because he hadn't eaten in at least a day, but there was only one instinct screaming at him now. Food! He tried to tell himself it was ridiculous, that he couldn't eat other creatures, but that instinct had overtaken him. He dropped from the branch, landing on the ground with an audible thud, and then started his way towards the creature. It took him a while to get close, but the creature didn't seem to be moving with any haste, and it kept stopping to point at the surroundings with a strange object, and the Caterpillar was finally able to draw level. He crawled onto the black, strange foot of the creature, and then the creature suddenly moved, and the Caterpillar anticipated death for a second, but then he felt himself lifted into the air, and held at eye level with the creature

"Bloody hell," He would have heard if he'd been able to understand English. "You're a big one, aren't you? I need to get a pic of this." The creature placed the Caterpillar on its shoulder, and proceeded to raise the object up to them, seemingly facing them. It was almost like it was trying to help the Caterpillar. Almost. But the shoulder was a perfect place for what the Caterpillar had in mind. He crawled around, moving up to the creature's neck.

"Smile for the selfie," he might have understood the creature say. But he definitely understood its stiffening as his mandibles, having grown faster than the rest of him, sank into his neck and drew blood. The mandibles slashed through skin and muscle, until they found the arteries underneath, and then cut through those as well. By this point, the creature was screaming and thrashing, but the strength appeared to have drained from it, and it collapsed to the ground, bringing the Caterpillar with it. By this point, he was drenched in blood, and it had soaked into the earth surrounding them. Having brought down his prey, the Caterpillar allowed himself a moment of shock. He had just killed another living creature. Killed it when it thought he was harmless. But all the qualms in the world couldn't stop the hunger driving him to survey the creature...his latest meal? It was far bigger than he was. Days of eating, quite possibly. Maybe even a whole weak. For the first time, he could see something that might possibly bring an end to his hunger. Still, he wasn't sure how to go about this. His mandibles could only bite off small chunks at a time. Deciding to just follow the instincts that were even now screaming at him to stop thinking and just tear at the meat, he crawled over to the seemingly fleshier parts of the creature's arm and tore off a small chunk with his mandibles, which he then nibbled at. However, as soon as he got the taste he began to savage the corpse, tearing at the flesh and swallowing it. It was good, and there was so much of it….

All in all, it took him about a week or so to eat the creature. He was slow at first but, impossible as it seemed, his appetite grew as he did. And with such a supply of food, he grew rapidly. He was now as tall as a dog, and much longer. And how his mandibles had grown. He had been covered in blood, but he'd still had to drink over the seven or eight days, and the water had washed it off. But still, even after so much food, he was ridiculously, agonisingly hungry. Even when he had been eating, it had only been dulled, but once again he was starving. It was stupid, it was impossible and it was unfair, but he was. He needed more food. And so far, these creatures….they were the best thing he'd ever eaten. He needed more of them. But maybe that wouldn't be so hard now. As he grew, he found himself able to travel vastly longer distances far quicker, so ground to cover wasn't an issue. But he hadn't seen any more of those creatures other than this one, so he wasn't sure where he could find them. Still, he'd only find out if he started looking.

It turned out his worries were needless. He'd only been travelling for maybe fifteen minutes when he came across two of them. Different from the one he'd killed, smaller, with longer fur. It took them a few seconds to see him, and when they did, one screamed, and the other pulled out an object similar to what the other one had had. It was kept trained on him as he came closer, but then dropped as he leapt and his mandibles flashed.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**

Police Detective Inspector Gareth Byrne looked at the bodies on the ground with scarcely concealed horror. He'd seen gruesome things done to corpses before, but this….left out in the open, stripped to the bone, took the biscuit. Some animal, perhaps? But what animal, other than a swarm of pirahnas, would take all the flesh off of a body?

"What do you think, Hector?" he asked the uniform officer next to him, Sergeant Hector Gwyn. A good man, if a little unimaginitive. Had memorised the police handbook back to front and probably in several languages.  
"'Ard to tell, Guv," Hector responded in his thick cockney accent, "Acid, maybe? Can' imagine any animal doing this. No' even some escaped lion or somethink."

"Can't be acid," Byrne contradicted him, "Look, there's blood around the body. To do this, you'd have to bathe the….thing in acid, and that clearly hasn't happened."

"I think the technical term is "victim", Guv, not "thing"." Hector told him seriously, "And wha'ever you say. The boys are getting a cordon up and stopping any press from getting through."  
"Good," Byrne said, "Keep this away from the media until we know what did this. And ideally, if someone did, until we have the bastard banged up."  
"I think the technical term is "murderer"," Hector pointed out, and then walked off to the cordon.

Byrne thought about the journalists as he contemplated the body, waiting for forensics to get there. Maybe they should be kept further from the body than a few metres of forest. For all he knew, whatever had attacked the man, whom they were still waiting on dental records for, was still very much present, and maybe still murderous. And none of his boys had guns. They weren't armed response, after all. He had the only weapon that wasn't a glorified stick, and one officer with a 26 Glock wouldn't do much if an escaped lion or insane murderer went after the journalists. He would have snorted at the thought had it not had such consequences. An escaped lion was ridiculous, but a murder crime scene was nowhere to be laughing. But still, it was bothering him. No teeth marks, no charring, no acid, and yet somebody had taken the time to meticulously strip all the flesh from the man. If it was some madman, he was a very determined one.

He was broken from his reverie by Hector running back to him.

"Yes, Sergeant?" he asked. Gwyn's expression made it clear that it was something serious. Years of professional instincts had him guess what the officer was about to tell him.

"There's another body, Guv," Hector said, "No' too far away. One of the journalists found i'. Swamin' over it as we speak."

Byrne cursed, and then went over his options.

"Tell Detective Sergeant Drake to stay here," He said as he began to walk briskly, "I'll go deal with the vultures." He considered, "And tell the bloody forensics to hurry up!"

He couldn't begin to guess how many pictures had been taken by the time he'd finally jogged over to the murder scene. Knowing the sort of journalists they got round his parts, probably thousands. It didn't take him long to find the body, he just had to follow the noise and camera flashes. When he got there, he saw the journalists still taking pictures, and arguing with a couple of uniform officers

"Alright alright, this is a crime scene," Byrne said tiredly as he moved up to them, "You know the deal." Normally he tried to play nice with the press, but today was just too much. The journalists grumbled, but they gradually dispersed, leaving Byrne and the two officers with the dead body. Of course, they weren't far away. A few of them might even be hunting for another corpse. The idiots.

"Get a cordon up," he said to the uniform officers, "I don't want any of them pushing their luck."

He then turned back to the corpse. He'd have to wait for forensics to get here, but to him, it looked different. The person, and he couldn't be sure it it was a man or a woman, was very much dead, and much of their flesh had been stripped from their body. But unlike the last one, it hadn't been done completely. There were still chunks of flesh here and there. The odd tendon or ligament or whatever it was. The bones looked like they had marks in them as well. It was like the first murder had been done with something precise over an unusually long amount of time, but the second had been done with a meat cleaver and rushed. Byrne had no idea what might have caused the change in the killer's modus operandi, but he was done speculating until the forensic crew showed up.

Byrne wasn't sure how long he'd been expecting the victims to be dead for. The forensic team told him that the first victim had been dead for two days, which was fairly standard, and also helpful. He now had a timeframe to ask anyone who might be an eyewitness if they'd seen anything strange. However, the estimate on the second victim left him cold.

"About an hour and a half," Jill Foster, the forensic said, and cast a worried look in his direction. An hour and a half. It'd been maybe twenty minutes since the body had been found, which meant the killer might be somewhere nearby. But even discounting that, the pattern itself was worrying. Serial murders were done over the course of months, even years. Not days. Could this be some sort of new gang, perhaps? Some initiation rite? It couldn't be one man, surely. Or even some escaped animal. Speaking of which, he couldn't see anything that might indicate an animal. No paw prints, and the forensics said that the slashes in the second victim weren't anything claws could do. So Byrne's ideas were primarily around humans, by this point. Checking for footprints had been useless, there were footprints all around this stretch of forest, and there were new ones constantly. The one unusual feature was what looked like a trench gouged into the ground, but Byrne had assumed it had been someone logging. He'd ask Hector to look into it later.

He was aware of footsteps behind him, and turned, expecting one of the uniform boys, or maybe a forensic, but he was surprised to see DS Drake behind him.

"Pretty grim, isn't it, Guv?" she asked, "Worst we've had for a while."

"Probably the worst we've had since…." He tried to think of another case they'd had that was this dark.

"Since the single father in Chelsea?" Drake suggested, and Byrne nodded.

"Yeah, probably," Byrne said, and sighed, "But this can't be one person, can it?"

"That depends," Drake told him, "Got anything linking the victims together?"

"Other than about a hundred metres?" Byrne asked, "We're not sure yet. Forensics are trying to get an ID, but it's gonna be hard for the second one. Even the teeth were damaged on the poor bastard."

"Don't let Sergeant Gwyn hear you say that," Drake said with a smile, "He'll have you read the handbook on appropriate language."

"I don't think this is the place for jokes," Byrne said, somewhat brusquely, looking around the scene. "But unless any of us have some breakthrough, we'll have to wait for forensics to figure out who the hell these people are."

"You manage to deal with the press?" Drake asked, changing the subject somewhat.

"They went away soon enough," Byrne said, and started looking for a nearby tree stump to sit on. His legs were unusually tired. "Would have thought with the logging, there'd be more stumps around, wouldn't you?"

A frown passed over Drake's face.

"Logging?" she asked, "What logging? This is a protected forest."

"No logging, but…?" He looked again at the trail gouged into the floor, and made a snap decision. It was probably nothing, but it never hurt to make sure.

"Get Hector and another officer over here now!" he said, and added, as an afterthought, "And make it somebody tough."

Sergeant Hector Gwyn and Police Constable Dominic Matthews didn't look all too impressed with his hunch, but Byrne could tell they felt somewhat useless at the scene. He did as well. He just didn't want to think about the reams of paperwork he'd end up having to do because of this.

"You sure this is somethink, Guv?" Hector asked, "It could be...I dunno."

Matthews was regarding the gouge in the soil. He was a quiet man, rarely speaking, but now he spoke.

"It is a long mark," he said, "Much longer than a fallen tree. Perhaps we should look at it."

"Wonderful," Byrne said, "So let's go see what this is."

They started following the gouge, keeping an eye out for movement in the trees. Matthews and Hector had their truncheons on display, but not out, and Byrne himself was making sure his gun wasn't visible. If they did find whatever had killed those people, they didn't want to escalate the situation. Periodically, Byrne updated the other officers in the area on his radio. After maybe five minutes, they came across a fork in the gouge.

"We're not splitting up," Byrne said right away, "I've seen enough scooby doo to know that's a terrible idea."

"And it's agains' protocol," Hector sighed, "We should go left. I'll radio another team to go right."

They'd been travelling along the gouge for ten minutes and not seen another corpse, which in Byrne's opinion was a good thing. Sure, maybe it meant they weren't on the right trail, but it also meant there wouldn't be some crazed killer at the end of _this_ trail. Still, his mind was still working as they walked, trusting one of the others to call out anything they saw. He was trying to think up motives, weapons, anything that might lead them to the killer. One of the corpses had been completely stripped bare, but the other had had most of the flesh torn off, and gouges in the bones. Why the change in method? His instincts pointed him towards two killers, but that wasn't something he wanted to think about for long. Two killers were definitely not what he needed right now.

"Any thoughts, Sergeant Gwyn?" he asked, just to give himself something to think about.

"Well I ain't the detective, guv," Hector said, "But people don' murder somebody an' hack all the flesh off 'em in the middle of a forest. In the open. It's jus' not...done."

"You think somebody killed somebody, stripped them to the bone, and dumped them out here?" Byrne asked, and then shook his head, "Can't work. The area around the corpses is soaked in blood. And it's recent."

Hector was about to reply when Matthews spoke again.

"The tree cover is thickening," he said, pointing ahead of them. He was right. The gouge led into a much thicker area of trees, where it was much darker.

"Bloody brilliant," Byrne sighed, and started walking faster. "Well, we might as well get on with it."

They'd been walking for maybe three minutes in the dark when they finally saw it. They all stopped moving and Byrne could have sworn they were all holding their breath.

"Bloody hell..." He breathed, looking at the creature in front of them. It was like some sort of worm, but bigger than any creepy-crawly ever. Bigger than most animals ever, full stop. It was perhaps thirty feet long and ten feet tall. But most horrifying was the mouth. Pincers, a full five feet long.

"Guv..." Hector said, his voice cracking slightly, "Guv, what is that?"

"I don't know, Sergeant Gwyn," Byrne replied, trying to keep his voice level and slightly sarcastic, the way it always was, "It would appear to be a giant worm." While outside he sounded reasonably calm, inside, he was panicking. No way could this be true. It had to be some sort of prank, some trick.

"Well that is obvious, sir," Matthews said, "But...how...?"  
"I don't know, Matthews," Byrne said brusquely. He had to keep a calm appearancen, even in the face of the impossible, to avoid worrying his men, "But we're not here for giant worms. We're here for a killer."

"You can't jus'...leave it, Guv," Hector protested, "It's...It's..."  
"It's what, Sergeant Gwyn?" Byrne snapped, wanting to do nothing more than run away right now, "Tell me Sergeant, what is the protocol for impossibly sized insects?"

"There ain't one, Guv," Hector sighed, "But...Don' you think this might be what we're looking for?"

"We're not going to waste our time with a bloody worm!" Byrne shouted, his calm front evaporating, "We are not the RS-bloody-PCA, Sergeant, and I doubt a worm, no matter how big, killed those people. We are wasting time!"

"There is blood around its mouth," Matthews spoke, peering into the darkness. Byrne sighed in anger.

"For Pete's sake," he sighed, and glared at the monstrosity. "Matthews, you radio for backup. Gwyn...It doesn't even look alive to me. It hasn't moved this whole time. Check if it's...breathing...or whatever." He paused, "But be careful."

Gwyn knew better than to argue with Byrne, and he slowly approached the insect, crouched low and with a truncheon in hand as Matthews spoke into his radio, requesting a team of officers to their location. Hector had his head cocked, and was carefully watching the creature for any sign of life. He slowly shifted his grip on the truncheon, and before Byrne could protest, gently jabbed it into the side of the thing.

"I said be careful!" Byrne hissed, his hand on his gun, ready to use it if the thing so much as moved.

"I think it's dead, Guv," Hector said, turning away from it, "Look, nothing." There was an optimistic smile on his face, and Byrne knew he was hoping this creature was what had killed the people, and now it was dead.

He was still wearing that optimistic smile when the pincers flashed and took his leg off at the thigh.


End file.
